Yup. No Finesse There

[Detroit News] Citing Barack Obama’s recent pass on a similar question — “At what point does a baby get human rights?” — Brokaw asked Pelosi what she would say to Obama were he to ask her advice.

Pelosi didn’t finesse her answer, as Obama did when he said the question was above his pay grade, but she may wish she had.

“I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time,” Pelosi began. “And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctrines of the church have not been able to make that definition. … St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to choose. … I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins.”

Finagle A Seat, Win A Soapbox

[CTV] The Green Party now has its first MP in Parliament, and he is an ex-Liberal who had resigned from that party’s caucus over accusations of election financing irregularities.

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The Greens, a relatively young federal party in Canada, have not yet elected an MP in either a byelection or general election. As a result, its leaders have not been invited to participate in televised leaders’ debates during the campaign. However, it did capture 4.5 per cent of the popular vote in the Jan. 23, 2006 election, which entitles it to public financing.

May noted in the release that with “a Green MP sitting in the House of Commons, it will now be impossible to exclude the Green Party from the televised leaders’ debates in the next election.”

Iranian Nukes? No Sweat. Geneva Science Experiment? Against Human Rights.

[Telegraph] Critics of the Large Hadron Collider – a £4.4 billion machine due to be switched on in ten days time – have lodged a lawsuit at the European Court for Human Rights against the 20 countries, including the UK, that fund the project.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Scientists involved in the project have dismissed the fears as “absurd” and insist that extensive safety assessments on the 17 mile long particle accelerator have demonstrated that it is safe.

92-Year-Old UK Protester: Closing Post Office Outlet Violates Human Rights

[Western Morning News] WHEN 92-year-old great-grandmother Lillian Brown was spotted lying on her back in the middle of a busy high street, passers-by naturally dashed over to help her back on her feet.

But Mrs Brown had no intention of moving.

Far from being a frail pensioner in distress, Mrs Brown was a protester determined to bring the town to a standstill in anger at the closure of her local post office.

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Eileen Noakes, 85, who joined the protest, said: “Any civilised government subsides public services, but in this country, every single thing is judged on whether it makes a profit. It’s an erosion of our civil liberties and human rights – that’s what we’re really protesting about.”

Inclusion And Equality = Ban Heterosexuals From Competition

[UK Gay News] English club Stonewall Lions FC has convincingly won the Gay World Football Championship today at Leyton Orient’s league ground, the Matchroom Stadium, in London.

The London-based club defeated the Argentine team Safgay FC, 5-0, the biggest winning margin in a final since the inaugural competition in September 1997 in Washington DC.

Stonewall previously won the Gay Football World Championship in 2002 and 2006, and last month won the European Gay Football Championship.

…

“Gay footballers are helping break down stereotypes and prejudice.  They are ambassadors for gay inclusion and equality. Gay football enhances understanding and acceptance of gay and lesbian people,” he concluded.

Pakistani Senator: Don’t Politicize Murder

[Daily Times] The killing of women for honour is a demand of the tribal traditions, Balochistan Senator Israrullah Zehri informed the Senate on Friday.

Zehri was responding to Senator Yasmeen Shah’s statement in which she had drawn the House’s attention towards reports that five women had been buried alive in Balochistan in the name of honour. She called it a sheer violation of human rights.

Zehri asked the members not to politicise the issue, as it was a matter of safeguarding the tribal traditions.

Lame Times At Appeasement High

[Brampton News] The Peel District School Board’s newest secondary school is the first in the world to be named for leading Canadian human rights advocate Louise Arbour. Louise Arbour Secondary School is located in the Springdale area of Brampton and will open in fall 2009.

Notes Janet McDougald, chair of the board, “Louise Arbour is a passionate and determined human rights advocate who has worked to improve the human condition around the world. Her commitment to social justice connects strongly to the vision and focus of our new school.”

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[National Post] In the aftermath of the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, Arbour even went so far as to suggest that the Jewish state had more blood on its hands than the terrorists who started the war in the first place: “In [the case of Hezbollah] you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent — the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad — but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved,” she said. “[But] how can you compare that with [Israel,] where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic.”

A Little Feel-Good Padding For Rich Resumes

[Globe and Mail] A Winnipeg real estate mogul, a former president of the Montreal Canadiens and a Quebec sociologist and film historian have been named to the first board of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights by Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner.

Eight members – six men, two women – were named trustees late Wednesday by the minister. At press time last night, it was unclear if Ms. Verner might be naming more members to the board, which is scheduled to hold its first meeting in Winnipeg next month. The Museums Act allows the government to appoint as many as 11 trustees, including the chair.

New Target? Golf Course Winds Up On The Radar

[Canadian Press] A posh golf course in B.C.’s Lower Mainland is denying membership to non-English-speaking players, similar to a controversial plan by the LPGA.

The private Vancouver Golf Club, which opened nearly 100 years ago in Coquitlam, B.C., rejects potential members who don’t speak English.

The club’s general manager, Brent Gough, has said the policy is designed to ensure all members are able to communicate and understand the club’s rules.

Gough stopped taking calls on the issue Friday, but he told CBC that the policy was introduced a few years ago after prospective members – in particular East Asian immigrants – started applying with the help of translators.

Jewish Human Rights Group: CHRC Out Of It

[National Post] Canada’s human rights commissions have shown “a disastrous combination of investigative zeal and substantive ignorance” that has left them vulnerable to abuse by “political Islam,” the same ideology that has hijacked the United Nations human rights council, according to B’nai Brith Canada.

In a submission to an independent review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s hate speech mandate, the Jewish human rights group states that “when it comes to this particular threat to human rights, human rights commissions just don’t get it.”

Okay, Professor. Then Screw Myanmar Victims, Chinese Political Prisoners, Georgian Civilians, And Targets Of Darfur’s Genocide…Right?

A tract from a quack University of Toronto poli sci professor. We can assume he only studies Canadian politics, as anything taking place outside Canada’s borders would be none of his business. Or would it…?

[Globe and Mail, August 26, 2008. Clifford Orwin] I loathe human-rights commissions as much as anyone. They are an excrescence on our body politic, and they make Canada a less free society, not a freer one. Their procedures are grossly unfair, placing intolerable pressures, financial and otherwise, on defendants to settle their cases even where they are innocent. They represent a malign bureaucracy run wild. There are other legal avenues for pursuing issues of discrimination, and any federal government with guts would at the very least rein in these commissions.

But this is for Canadians to worry about. Americans should stick to their own worries. The petitioners’ claim that human-rights commissions pose a threat to them is bogus.

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[Globe and Mail, July 30, 2008. Clifford Orwin]  I’m not an expert on China, so I’m inclined to defer to those Salonistas that are. I opposed awarding the Games to Beijing, because the world takes that for an honour, and the regime deserved no such honour.

Hey, prof. You’re not Chinese. So shut up.

“Never, Ever” Marched In A Pride Parade? Obviously, You’re A Bigot

[Georgia Straight] Pierre Trudeau showed leadership when he declared that “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” Canadian judges showed leadership when, first in Ontario and then in six other provinces, they held that same-sex marriage was a constitutionally protected right.

But don’t expect any leadership from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Harper opposed same-sex marriage. He refused to speak at the International AIDS conference in Toronto in 2006. He has never, ever marched in a Pride Parade.

Floods Are Only Heartbreaking And Scandalous In Louisiana

[USA Today] President Bush declared Brevard, Monroe, Okeechobee and St. Lucie counties in Florida major disaster areas, clearing the way for funds to help local governments do emergency work and repairs.

The aid does not yet include individual homeowners whose properties were damaged by high winds or flood waters. Florida’s emergency management center said Fay damaged or destroyed nearly 1,100 homes. Gov. Charlie Crist said the storm caused millions of dollars in property and agricultural damage.

Late Sunday, rescue teams began evacuating people from 180 homes in a town about 25 miles north of Orlando. Workers used boats to evacuate people from DeBary, where some streets were under 4 feet of water.

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[New Orleans City Business, August 25, 2008 – three years after Katrina] In the political sphere, you can count on the Katrina card being played ad infinitum. On the heels of the president’s visit, Sen. Mary Landrieu was critical of the federal bureaucracy that has impeded recovery — you can throw state and city government into the same ring. Mayor C. Ray Nagin maintained Bush, who gushed with reports of recovery progress Wednesday at Jackson Barracks, has yet to fulfill promises he made in his September 2005 speech from Jackson Square.

Gazette Reporter: Dummies Just Don’t “Get It”

[Montreal Gazette] To expect the Olympic Games to be an engine of major, rapid social change and to grade their success or failure accordingly is simply not to get what they are about.

These Games, finally, as well organized and smoothly run as any in history, were about the athletes and the competitions, not the notorious Beijing pollution, nor the country’s problematic record on human rights, nor China’s ongoing measures to deal with the environment.

And now that the Games are over…do those things matter again?

Political Scientists Afraid To Meet In Toronto

[Western Standard] The American Political Science Association–the largest association for political scientists in the world–is planning to host its 2009 annual conference in Toronto. That has some political scientists sufficiently concerned to start a petition to keep the event out of Canada.

…

“Our belief is that most Americans–even APSA members–have no idea how precarious the rights of freedom of speech and conscience are in Canada,” said Bradley Watson, professor of American and Western political thought at Pennsylvania’s St. Vincent College.

But Hey, Why Spoil The Fun Of Pole Vault?

[Globe and Mail] If there was an alternative Olympic medal list for human-rights violations, it would contain numbers like these: 53 detained pro-Tibet activists, 77 rejected protest applications, at least 15 Chinese citizens arrested for seeking to protest, about 10 dissidents jailed and at least 30 websites blocked.

Supreme Court Justice: Time For Me To Tell The People Which Laws To Write

[Lawyers Weekly] Lawmakers should consider enacting new legislation that would enable Canadian companies to be sued domestically in superior court for alleged complicity in human rights violations abroad, says Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ian Binnie.

The judge said that Canada and many other nations have signed on to international treaties and conventions that guarantee various labour and human rights, yet most have not created fora to air and legally determine complaints that domestic companies have aided and abetted human rights abuses carried out by the governments of the foreign jurisdictions where they do business.

Vancouver Sun Columnist: Who Are We To Lecture China, Since We’re Evil, Too?

[Vancouver Sun] Canadians who have poked the dragon in the eye by trying to use the Olympic games as a platform to protest China’s treatment of Tibet or its dismal human rights record have discovered a hard truth about totalitarian regimes — they really don’t tolerate dissent in the way we are used to here.

At the same time, the focus on human rights abuses in China raises the question of whether Canada’s hands are clean enough to allow us to lecture the Chinese government on the sensitive issue.

The Human Right To Extort Your Doctor

[National Post] If the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) gets its way, Ontario’s doctors will soon be stripped of their right to follow their moral convictions or religious beliefs when treating patients. In other words, doctors will risk losing their licenses if they run afoul of Ontario’s human rights police.

If, out of moral conviction, they refuse to perform abortions, refer patients for abortions or prescribe morning-after and birth control pills, or if they refuse to help same-sex couples conceive children, their own governing body will take away their right to practice medicine.

Washed Up Chretien: Harper Should Have Been More Like Me And Left His Balls In The John

[Globe and Mail] Prime Minister Stephen Harper has risked relations with China by failing to attend the Olympic Games and going overboard in honouring Tibet’s Dalai Lama, former prime minister Jean Chrétien said yesterday.

Speaking to a Canadian Bar Association gathering, Mr. Chrétien said the missteps are indicative of a government that naively fails to understand the enormous strides the Chinese regime has made in recent years, and that China has a long “collective memory” when it comes to international slights.

Like, Yeah! Sorority’s Been Advancing Human Rights For 100 Years

[Market Watch] Alpha Kappa Alpha’s international president Barbara A. McKinzie will articulate the Sorority’s 100-year record of advancing human rights when she journeys to Paris from September 3-5 to join other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) affiliated with the United Nations’ Department of Public Information.

That’s nice, cupcake. Now crack the keg and get on with the wet t-shirt contest.

Liberal Aussie Politician Laments Canada’s Freaky Star Chambers

More international bad press for Canadian human rights commissions.

[The Australian] All this is frighteningly reminiscent of the situation in Canada, where official agencies of the state prosecute citizens for the thought-crime of political incorrectness. Canada’s federal and provincial human rights commissions were established to fight discrimination in housing and employment. But these quasi-judicial bodies have metastasised into partisan star-chamber tribunals that selectively file charges against those who espouse conservative political or religious beliefs.

Is That A Bench, Or A Soap Box?

[Globe and Mail] Supreme Court of Canada Judge Ian Binnie issued a call Tuesday for Canadian multi-national corporations to pay more attention to human rights abuses in Third World countries where they operate.

Cataloging a long list of cases where developing countries were accused of harming their local populations in order to attract or keep foreign corporations operating with their borders, Judge Binnie urged lawyers with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association to persuade their employers to show a greater sense of global responsibility.

George Clooney To Make Film About Gitmo Prisoner

[AlterNet] He boasts of being Barack Obama’s “BlackBerry buddy”, never mind a UN Commissioner for Peace and a driving force behind the Save Darfur campaign.

In the latest incarnation of his irrepressible political instincts, the Hollywood actor George Clooney may find himself gnawing at a raw nerve. He has bought the film rights to a book chronicling the life and trial of Salim Hamdan, the Yemen-born driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden who was jailed last week for five-and-a-half years for supporting terror.

Guess Everything’s Going Well In Myanmar

Myanmar? What’s Myanmar? Hell with it, let’s slam the UK.

[Associated Press] The U.N. Human Rights Committee is criticizing Britain over its tough counterterrorism laws, legislation that limits free speech and the use of an Indian Ocean territory to secretly move suspected terrorists without legal process.

The report also says Britain’s Official Secrets Act — enacted during the Cold War to protect national security data — helps silence government whistleblowers and keeps important information from the public.

The committee issues its human rights reports every three years after countries offer their own assessments.

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[Mizzima] The Burma Campaign UK, a group advocating for human rights and democracy in Burma, said the girl’s naked body was found along with her clothes, slippers, and the basket that she carried on the fateful day.

Nang Seng, Campaign Officer at the BCUK told Mizzima, “This is one incident among thousands of cases and is the trademark of the Burmese Army’s use of rape as weapon of war in Burma.”

According to the BCUK, Nhkum Hkawn Din’s skull was smashed, her eyes were gouged out, her throat was slit, she had stab wounds on her right rib cage, and her face was mutilated. She had been stabbed in the abdomen after she was raped. She was further violated with knives.